The Fetish of Accuracy

Perspectives on Early Modern Time(s)

Bibliographic Data

ID4162203
AuthorsStefan Hanß (0000-0002-7597-6599, University of Manchester, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume243
Issue1
Pages267-284
Publication date2019-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtz011
OpenAlexW2943527348
LanguageEN
Citations received7

‘On the whole’, Lucien Febvre states, ‘they were the ways of a peasant society, which accepted the fact that it would never know the exact time except when the bell rang (assuming it was set properly) and otherwise referring to plants and animals, to the flight or song of some bird’. Febvre assembles a variety of sixteenth-century examples that underpin his observation that ‘we find fancifulness, imprecision, inexactness everywhere, the doing of men who did not even know their ages precisely’. For Febvre, sixteenth-century protagonists ‘lacked a historical sense’ since ‘for many men of that time the historical was confused with the mythical’. He concludes that ‘time was not measured with accuracy’ and that ‘no one bothered to keep track of it, reckon it, or regard it in an exact way’.1 Febvre may be taken as representative of a view commonly shared by many historians: early modern protagonists desired temporal accuracy but were unable to achieve it; as a result, nobody cared about temporal precision in everyday life. In what follows I argue that historians have too often assumed a desire for accurate time and subjection to imprecision in the sixteenth century. This assumption relied on establishing the early modern period as ‘the other’, a foreign object of study, where accuracy of time measurement serves as a distancing device. Such approaches to early modern history may turn periodization itself into a language of temporal judgement and construction that hampers our understanding of sixteenth-century realities of time. The historiography’s fetish of accuracy, I argue, is more revelatory of modern conceptualizations of modernity than the temporalities of early modern protagonists. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that this viewpoint is not against approaching early modern sources with a set of present questions in mind. This article brings to the surface the implications of present questions and shows how accuracy has been made a yardstick for past societies and present cultural hegemonies.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Everyday life · Historiography · Judgement · Linguistics · Literature · Object (grammar) · Periodization · Set (abstract data type) · Variety (cybernetics) · Computer Science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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